nisus.com

As a technical writer, I create documents with heavy graphic files inside. If the graphic files can only be embedded, as in Nisus, documents ends up being huge.

Using LinkBack (or any other technique) to only embed a link to external graphics files would decrease the Nisus document's size, and avoid duplicating graphic data alreay on the disk. Nisus would act as a simple viewer, when an illustration is shown onscreen. This is how DTP programs usually work.

I would like embedding or linking to be decided at three levels:

- a general preference for all new documents
- a general preference for the open document
- a local setting for each single illustration

Pasted clips would obviousluy be embedded.

A feature collecting all linked data in a single folder, as InDesign does, would be a very welcome plus.

Best regards,
Paolo

Hello Paulo

This is how DTP applications grew up back in the day because our original Macs offered us an 8 Mhz 68000 chip with 128 KB RAM and a single 400 KB floppy for storage. With this limited computing power and storage, we had to keep the files skinny.

I suspect placement of proxies and linking of graphic files is not a priority now because of the amount of computing power and storage we have today. The humble 1.83 Ghz CoreDuo in my current Mac mini is so far ahead of the old Mac's 68000 that you would need an astronomical telescope to bridge the gap between the two, the 2 GB RAM I now run is 8000 times the 128 KB RAM of the original Mac and the total of 750 GB HD capacity I have is 1,650,000 times the storage capability I had with my 400 KB floppy.

I wonder how much advantage there would be in NWPro using linked graphics which came out of applications tied to it by LinkBack which means, by definition, that they are Cocoa apps (I think). I would expect graphics produced in a Cocoa app to still exploit the OS X resources when they are pasted into NWPro so they aren't some great extra burden that NWPro has to carry along unaided. Or is my logic and/or understanding of how Cocoa apps work quite faulty here?

You will be as familiar as I am, perhaps more so, with the problem with documents with many links -- gathering up all the linked elements for remote printing, archiving, etc. PageMaker has its Save For Service Provider (S4SP) script, Xpress had/has some kind of similar facility, Canvas has such a capability too. If NWPro used proxies and links then it would need some kind of facility like that and/or the capability to "save as" to a final document which incorporated all the graphics in full.

Personally, I do my DTP work in Canvas -- now, sadly, discontinued for Mac, but hey, it will soldier on for years yet -- which integrates all the graphics tools into the one program, so that all the graphics stuff, both vector and raster, is simply part of the document. If I import a graphic, I just convert it to Canvas on the way in (although proxy placement and linking are offered). Works fine. I notice that the latest Xpress is offering more built-in graphics capability and the same is happening with InDesign.

Cheers, Geoff

Geoffrey Heard, Business Writer & Publisher

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Geoff,

The last technical document I worked on in Nisus was a mere 25-pages document, weighting more than 90MB. Saving it on my Dual G5 takes forever. It might take less on a modern Intel Mac, but I suspect it is still a long time. In FrameMaker, with all linked illustrations, a similar document saves instantly.

Add to this how much space is wasted by duplicating all the illustrations (the original + the embedded). Not to mention that when working on tech documents, you often modify the illustrations by developer's request, and this currently means having to edit the original files, then import/position them again in Nisus.

It is to be seen whether or not Nisus should become a text-oriented DTP application. I hope so, since after the demise of FrameMaker we are left without a technical writing program on the Mac. NWP and Mellel could be valuable starting points, but there are still several things done "the wrong way" in them both (including the way they embed graphic files in the document).

I know several academic authors have considered FrameMaker an advanced wordprocessor in the past. So, maybe it is not a request from technical writers only, if we ask Nisus to become a little more like it (and mixing in something from InDesign/XPress, like the file gathering feature).

Best regards,
Paolo

I second to this request. I'm presently cooking a manual that weights 3+ MB as RTF and 2 MB as RTFD (go figure) and it takes a noticeable 4~7-second delay when saving [*]. All graphics are links back to OmniGraffle, a technology I hadn't fully understood in the beginning, 10 months ago...

There's still a slight problem: when inserted, the graphics forget their original filenames.

I wouldn't object to this if I didn't have to render the document in HTML format, where it appears the graphics [rendered as PDF by default] are too small and need further tweaking. Under these circumstances, manipulating opaque filenames like "image-150-3" is a nightmare.

[*] 7200 RPM drive on iMac 2.8 GHz intel 2-core